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Cloud Builds Community At The University Of New England

Not only is there a wonderful spirit of community at the University of New England – but the state of Maine is a shining example of how a rural community can sustain itself with the power of cloud!

I was honored to be the University’s first guest speaker this year – to update UNE faculty, students, researchers and residents on the latest in cloud computing and its impact on education, business, government and teenagers!

Maine Public Broadcasting Network will also make the live video available to everyone who would like to catch up.

UNE is a hidden gem in Biddeford and Portland, Maine, with a new cross-cultural campus in Tangier, Morocco. It’s an innovative health sciences and liberal arts school recognized by U.S. News & World Report for excellence in its undergraduate and master’s programs.

UNE is Maine’s largest educator of healthcare professionals. Its College of Osteopathic Medicine is a national leader in primary care training, geriatrics, rural and family medicine. Graduates comprise 15% of Maine’s primary care physician workforce, with 25% serving in rural areas and 17% practicing in medically underserved areas across New England.

According to UNE President Danielle N. Ripich, Ph.D., as UNE expands its health sciences offerings, more and more graduates are staying in Maine to take care of their own.

Now that’s a self-sustaining community!

UNE was pleased to host President George H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush in a rare public appearance to award Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser of Qatar with the George Bush Award for Excellence in Public Service. Sheikha Moza bint Nasser is a tireless advocate for education reform around the world.

I was delighted to attend and talk a little cloud with former New Hampshire Governor and Bush Chief of Staff John H. Sununu, former Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card and several former U.S. ambassadors.

Cloud For Healthcare in Maine Maine has been a leader in implementing electronic medical records in a Health Information Exchange to share data between hospitals. Maine has also hosted the first medical image archive (X-rays, MRIs) in DellDell’s secure cloud platform. A data model and analytics platform will be available for providers to examine healthcare delivery and patient risk models to improve patient outcomes.

The cloud is also benefiting Maine’s genomics researchers. They study how genes can predict illness, so that medical treatments can be personalized for each of us in future. The cloud allows biomedical researchers to bring big data computes to an on demand IT infrastructure affordably. But while the cloud helps researchers process data, there are not enough bioinformatics experts available to help analyze results.

This issue was raised by local researchers attending my lecture. Maine has a growing biomedical community who does research or develops products for diagnostics and antibodies. Their need for access to bioinformatics experts is timely, as we will be discussing this at the 2013 launch of the U.S. Federal Big Data Initiatives.

I look forward to sharing this feedback with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and other stakeholders focused on how to educate more experts who can advance our big data economy.

Cloud Serves Rural CitizensThe cloud is also transforming rural healthcare. In places like India for example, Hewlett-PackardHewlett-Packard can rapidly deploy cloud-based healthcare infrastructure to deliver health services to even the most remote areas. This includes a self-powered mobile clinic with fully integrated platform for remote medical consultation, monitoring of medical personnel and equipment, automated uploads of health data, real-time disease surveillance and even patient SMS alerts for medication reminders and immunizations.

While UNE provides many of Maine’s primary care physicians, could Maine also benefit from such mobile medical clinics to deliver health services to its most remote citizens? It’s a unique way to provide a self-sustaining healthcare model with people, processes and technology all powered by the cloud!

Lobster, Lighthouses and the Mobile Cloud While perhaps best known for its lobster and lighthouses, Maine also has a growing startup community! Bangor, Portland and Biddeford all participated in the National Civic Hackathon on June 1-2. More than eighty cities nationwide joined in a weekend of community application development to solve local problems.

While Portland planned for a mobile data collection app for volunteers who protect and restore Casco Bay, Bangor wrote apps to analyze car crash data and track snow plows during storms. For those apps, I imagine that Maine’s unique specialization in geospatial technologies came in handy!

But perhaps the best example of the mobile cloud was exemplified by UNE’s own Vice President for Global Affairs and Communications and Director of the Center for Global Humanities, Anouar Majid, Ph.D. Dr. Majid was unable to attend my cloud lecture due to a conference on technology and education reform in New York. But he tuned in via the mobile cloud and recorded the talk from his smartphone while in the air, in the taxi and at the hotel!

It’s a premiere example of how the mobile cloud creates access anytime anywhere!

Many thanks to the University of New England and the state of Maine for their gracious hospitality and contributions to the cloud!

Follow @JacquelnVanacek for how cloud, mobile, social media and big data are reinventing our world.

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